Seconds later the shooting started. An 8-year-old boy stood in the middle of Johnson Street, jumping up and down and waving his hands in an attempt to draw fire from the barracks. “Troops move!” screamed the commander. The men fired wildly in all directions, as the crackle of AK-47s sounded from the walled-off barracks. During a lull in the firing, dozens of civilians, including a blind man led by the hand, scurried up the street carrying suitcases and baskets on their heads. The Krahns, including trained soldiers who served in the old Liberian Army, moved up streets parallel to Johnson and began sniping from rooftops and windows, driving back Kromah’s forces. A rocket-propelled grenade slammed through the glass window of the First Cumberland Church–a building dating from Liberia’s early days as a republic founded by freed American slaves.
Monrovia showed no sign of regaining its sanity last week. Chaos has gripped the capital ever since Easter weekend, when Roosevelt Johnson defied an arrest warrant for murder issued by Liberia’s State Council–the transitional government composed of rival warlords – and shot his way to refuge in the old army barracks. As a coalition of fighters tried to drive his supporters out of the seaside enclave, Monrovia remained desperate and dangerous. The streets belonged to armed adolescents who careered around in land cruisers and other vehicles looted from relief agencies, garishly spray-painted with names like “Die Hard” and “Death Squad.” The West African peacekeeping force known as ECOMOG, which is supposed to maintain order in Monrovia, stood by as looters carried off the little booty that remained. Meanwhile, the U.S. military wound down its evacuation effort after airlifting 2,000 people (including 400 Americans) to safety in neighboring Sierra Leone. On Thursday, U.N. special envoy James Jonah arrived to try to broker a peace deal between Johnson and his principal enemies, Kromah and Charles Taylor. Taylor commands the country’s most powerful armed group, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.
For civilians there was no refuge. “These armed men are terrorizing us,” said John Flomo, 60, a mechanic who huddled with 40 friends and relatives inside a corrugated metal hut one block from the Atlantic Ocean. A fire fight broke out on the beach as he spoke. “When we are not ducking gunfire, we have to worry about them coming here and stealing our food,” Flomo said. A few blocks away at the ransacked warehouses and offices of Doctors Without Borders, supervisor Theo Barley and a handful of other Liberian staffers struggled to provide water, food and medicine to 500 displaced people. Barley watched helplessly as six gunmen from Taylor’s faction burst into the compound, foraged through the wreckage and carted off three sacks of cornmeal and two car batteries. They were pursued by their commander, a man called Major Devil who wanted the loot himself.
The West African Peacekeeping Force remained unwilling or unable to step in. Established at the start of the Liberian civil war in 1990, the 8,000-man force was already notorious for corruption: Liberians joked that the acronym ECOMOG stands for “Every Car Or Moving Object Gone.” During the past two weeks they have lived up to their reputation. Soldiers have been seen in stolen cars with factional fighters, cruising the city and joining in the looting.
How might the stalemate end? Taylor has sounded in turn belligerent and conciliatory, warning Johnson to surrender while promising not to mount an all-out assault. He insists that Johnson stand trial, but it seems more likely that the government will have to grant Johnson amnesty or exile in Nigeria. That would leave Liberia with one fewer warlord, but it would hardly be enough to restore the country to sanity.
